Making my way through Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings (currently on Book 4). It's a bit of historical fiction covering the plots and politicking that followed the reign of Philip the Fair of France and would eventually culminate in the Hundred Years' War.

I'm enjoying it. It paints an engaging portrait of medieval France and there are many historical footnotes giving context and explanations that would otherwise clutter the main text. The series moves at a decent pace and doesn't get bogged down in fluff.

Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going Of interest even if you don't care much about Singapore. Consequentialism in politics and economics.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a wonderful book explaining how computers work. I've read the section on Computer Architecture in Gödel Escher Bach, but that did not stay in my mind. This book, however, explains how computers work from the most basic level; it starts with circuits and builds up! I have not finished it, but I'm over halfway and Petzold has built up a machine with memory and a calculator function, which can load items from memory and perform operations upon them.

At times it is a bit difficult to follow, but I think it has been written, overall, very well. I really have found it a fascinating book. Highly recommended.

• Project Nim:

  Thorough documentary on a 1970s scientific project in raising a chimpanzee as a human to get it to sign true language. The project was very well documented with photographs and footage, so with all the archival footage and retrospective interviews, we get a vivid sense of Nim and the people around him. Specifically, we get a vivid sense of everyone involved as having absolutely terrible judgment and the people involved as fanatical nurturists - why on earth would anyone expect such a thing to work? Why would chimpanzees have evolved true language when they never use that in the wild, and why would you expect any sort of objectivity from the involved personnel? Early on, the daughter of the foster-mother comments that "It was the '70s!"; which does explain a lot.

  It goes about as terribly as one expects: there is bitter infighting over who is Nim's 'real' parents, the footage of Nim 'signing' is quite weak (I know a little ASL myself, and I was deeply unimpressed by what we see Nim do - the teachers' claims about Nim communicating seem to be a hefty heaping of anthropormorphizing, reading into random gestures, and wishful thinking; a nice example of which is how one male teacher comments how Nim loved to play with cats and would "quiver" with excitement holding it, while later on, we see this 'quivering' is actually Nim trying to dry-hump the cats, and they eventually are taken away lest he kill them). As Nim gets bigger, it's less that he became human than his caretakers became chimpanzee: the original foster-mother and the new female teacher compete for who can play with and supplicate Nim the most, and Nim successfully dominates the two men involved while the women applaud and enjoy the dominance contests. (The project lead, Terrace, comments at one point that most of the staff turned out to be women.) The film-makers seem to try to draw a parallel by noting that Terrace slept with the first foster-mother before the project started and with one teacher during the project, but it doesn't work too well since Nim clearly won their hearts long-term. Unrestrained, with no other males to keep him in check, it predictably starts going all wrong - the female teacher in question recounts how Nim put ~100 stitches into her (I counted her enumeration), and then the project shuts down after he tears open her face.

  After which, of course, he goes back to the primate colony. The documentary & people lay it on thick how Nim is being terribly treated in this, but they're so compromised that it's impossible to take them seriously; I was baffled when they described him being sedated, to transport him safely back to the colony in a plane as quickly as possible, as being "a nasty thing to do. Very deceitful." Seriously‽ A growing male chimpanzee nearly killed his closest caretaker and that is your reaction to an entirely sensible measure, a completely irrelevant concern about deceitfulness, as if Nim were some sort of athlete whose competitor cheated? Similarly, a big deal is made of the locked collars on the chimpanzees at the colony... which turn out to be on the chimps so if one starts trying to chew your face off, you have a chance to defend yourself by grabbing the collar and holding them off.

  While at the primate colony, Nim's minimal signing skills seemed to degrade even further and the primates eventually start being used in medical experiments; rather than take it seriously and ask whether the medical experiments were scientifically & medically useful, the documentarians choose to simply show decontextualized injections. (With an approach like that, routine operations in a hospital would look like ghoulish crimes against humanity...)

  Finally, Nim winds up at a horse-rescue farm, where as a reminder of why Project Nim had to be terminated, we're told how he casually killed a dog one day and how, when the original foster-mother visited she, apparently still under many illusions, enters the cage to visit him and is attacked (one interviewee commenting, "The fact that he didn't kill her meant a lot, 'cause he could have." I see.)

• The King of Kong: fascinating in part because the stakes are so low, and the skullduggery so calculated; the access of the filmmakers to key players is so thorough that at times you're given a god's-eye point of view and it feels fictional (eg when you watch both sides of a telephone conversation happen).

I'm going to recommend the Muv Luv series of visual novels. This is a military sci-fi story where the lead of a slice-of-life harem/romcom finds himself in a war-torn alternate timeline, and has to learn to pilot giant robots in order to fight alongside battle-hardened versions of the girls from his own world. There are 3 parts: Muv Luv (romcom), Muv Luv Unlimited (darker military focus), and Muv Luv Alternative (very dark military/war). Muv Luv Alternative is the #1 ranked VN on vndb.org, with an average score of 9.28. Apparently it's also the highest ranked on the equivalent Japanese site.

The series has many virtues, but also some major caveats.

I'll start with the good stuff:

• Amazing battle sequences - the animation is very advanced for a VN and the best battles are among some of the most tense and exciting I've experienced in any medium.
• Interesting exploration of duty and identity in the politics arc.
• Fun character interactions and humor.
• Many very emotionally compelling moments - this story made me cry more than any other I've experienced (for both happy and sad reasons).
• Pretty smart writing in general - characters don't obviously hold the idiot ball unless they're supposed to be idiots or are acting emotionally at the time.
• Great world-building with well thought-through military/technical elements.
• Great character development for the main character.
• Amazing, film-quality music (more so in Alternative).

Downsides:

• Extremely long overall - at least about 80 hours for the whole thing.
• The first part ("Muv Luv") is a very silly and fluffy romcom, and while it's often amusing, it's over-long and some parts really drag (ugh, the lacrosse). By contrast to Alternative's 9.28 average score and #1 ranking, this only got 7.14 and #476, and shouldn't really be skipped due to important character and plot setup.
• Only available in English via an old pirated version that requires some technical fiddling to get it to work (comes with a readme to explain this).
• Has gratuitous sexual/fanservice elements.
• Some of the tear-jerker moments may come across as heavy-handed or manipulative if you're not in the right mood for them.

Neutral elements:

• Not heavily decision driven - the main routes in Muv Luv are extremely obvious, and Alternative only has one route.
• The prose (and/or translation thereof) is quite simple and straightfoward, compared to eg Fate/stay night.

I wasn't sure whether to post about this because of the downsides, but I read it a couple of months ago and it's still on my mind enough to feel worth recommending. I'd strongly recommend it if you have the time to spare and like both military sci-fi and emotion-heavy stories.

Content warning: Explicit sex and violence.